Allmighty comment tag

Google Analytics is pretty cool, I said something about it previously. It's Urchin, but re-released in the google family. I signed up for it the first day it was available for free, and started adding my websites to it as profiles. Well, the popularity of this service was a little more than Google expected, and they werent quite able to handle the high load of new traffic. So after a week they suspended new registrations and removed that ability to add new profiles if you already had an account. The only thing is the didnt actually remove the ability to add new profiles, all they did was comment out the link that you click to add those profiles.

So, the URL still works, you can add profiles to your heart's content actually. Which I'm sure is a relief to some people. Thank goodness for lazy web developers! I wonder if they have an opening....

technorati tags: google, analytics, comment, profiles

The allmighty comment tag

Google Analytics is pretty cool, I said something about it previously. It's Urchin, but re-released in the google family. I signed up for it the first day it was available for free, and started adding my websites to it as profiles. Well, the popularity of this service was a little more than Google expected, and they werent quite able to handle the high load of new traffic. So after a week they suspended new registrations and removed that ability to add new profiles if you already had an account. The only thing is the didnt actually remove the ability to add new profiles, all they did was comment out the link that you click to add those profiles.

So, the URL still works, you can add profiles to your heart's content actually. Which I'm sure is a relief to some people. Thank goodness for lazy web developers! I wonder if they have an opening....

technorati tags: google, analytics, comment, profiles

Tim and Becca

She want's this picture posted, because it's a fun one of the two of us sliding down a sand dune on our backs. Apperantly facebook now allows you to add photos to an album and tag them with the people that are in them. Cool, but I'm committed to flickr now. Sorry.

DMCA Protects Computer Exploit

McAfee didn't add detection code until Nov. 9, and as of Nov. 15 it doesn't remove the rootkit, only the cloaking device.

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

As much as this sounds like an article about Star-Trek, it's actually an enlightening article about the spread of the Sony CD copy protection software that opened up gaping vulnerabilities in any computer had a "protected" SONY CD in it's drive. The story broke at the end of October. This is exactly what the anti-DRM crowd has been warning of from the beginning. And no surprise, the reaction from the big corporations who provide computer software to protect your computer against these vulnerabilites responded with an underwhelming reaction.

This Wired article fails to cover one very important aspect though. The computer anti-virus companies cannot legally remove the vulnerability from your computer because that would violate the terms of the DMCA, specifically section 1201. This law prevents the circumvention or removal of any copyright protection scheme, even if that scheme harms the computer it is run on. So, really the McAfee and Semantec have their hands tied in this regard. The much criticized DMCA opens up yet another weak spot in the rights of consumers.

technorati tags: dmca, sony, rootkit, DRM

The fatalaties

Our latest photoset on flickr is from last weekend's trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park with some friends. It was pretty crazy, I had no idea that sand dunes existed in colorado. They are apperantly the tallest sand dunes in North America, and we climbed to the top of the second highest dune. It was very exhausting, and quite surreal. Just a few hour away, there are miles of sand dunes surrounded by mountains over 14,000 feet tall. And we climbed around and slid down them for most of saturday. Some guy brought his snowboard along, that was really cool. Sadly I have no pictures of that because our digital camera suffered mortally from the extreme conditions. Apperantly 50 mph wind gusts with walls of very fine sand is bad for electronics, go figure. I don't think it's possible to clean that sand out of the lens assembly... ugh. Everyone else on the trip made the same mistake though, I wonder how many cameras fail in that harsh environment.Becca started her new job today, we're very excited about that. Becca's been just a wee bit nervous. Now she's crabby after her big day.Interesting things afoot in the web analytics world. Google released Analytics yesterday. Which is really just Urchin, which they bought several months ago. The big news though is that it's free. Yeah, freaking altruistic google. We had been using Urchin for analytics for a while now, and it's kinda thrown us into a weird situation.

Becca thinks it’s important

I was convinced soon after I finished my big breakfast of pancakes and eggs to take a practice GRE. This wasn't really the best thing I had to do on a saturday morning, ninja turtles was on, but I decided to humor my wife and do it. So I finished the general test (verbal and math) in about 45 minutes. My final math score was a respectable 540, and my verbal score was 600. My dear sweet wife thinks that this score is impressive, she did take a year of graduate studies so I trust her judgement on these things. She wont tell me what her scores were though... hmmm. She is definately better than me at math, but that's no surprise. Just so you know, the GRE is taken by college seniors looking to get accepted by graduate schools. Only about %10 of college grads take the GRE, in this segment of the population my verbal score earned me an 85 percentile rank, and the math score was a still surprising 39 percentile, considering I only took math through college algebra, and that was about 4 years ago.

I sound incredily vain saying all these things about my intelligence, this is really something that Becca wants me to put up here, apperantly she just wants to live vicariously through my verbal score. One thing I really fear is that someone will now get the idea that I should go to grad school. But luckily, despite my GRE scores, I'm certain that my 2.85 GPA will preclude me from attending any graduate schools.

Oh, and work is going really well now. So, I'm pretty happy about that.

Happy Halloween

Watch out, it's the first public vlogcast from Tim and Becca, weclome to our world. Today we bring you the events of last night, halloween night. It's a frightful tale of what we are really like at home. Truly, you may laugh, you may cry... mainly, I just cry.